The Daily Caller published an op-ed blasting gay journalist James Kirchick for condemning[1] Russia's anti-gay crackdown on the Kremlin-funded RT network on August 21, lambasting Kirchick for using his appearance to "throw a fit about gay rights."

In an August 28 op-ed[2] titled "The hysterical Jamie Kirchick," Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute President Austin Ruse mocked Kirchick's "hysterical" criticism of Russia's laws banning the dissemination of "gay propaganda,"[3] which encompasses any speech or action that could be construed to depict LGBT people in a favorable light. Ruse doesn't understand why critics of Russia's "reasonable new law" just can't see that it's far better than the western "elite" agenda of tolerance:

Kirchick and his colleagues are hysterical and I think I know why. In the west, they and their elite allies have so cowed and bullied opposition to their agenda that hardly anyone speaks out against them. If you do, you lose your job or get brought before the magistrates of human rights. It is shocking and unnerving to them when they find people who are not so cowed and that they cannot have their way with those in other countries and certainly not with the Russians who overwhelmingly support the reasonable new law.

Next week in Europe a petition will be released from more than 70 mostly European human rights groups supporting the Russian law. They believe there is no human right to advance homosexual propaganda to school children, but there is a prior right for parents to determine how their children are educated. It says so right there in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This isn't the first time The Daily Caller has granted Ruse a platform to champion the Kremlin's draconian assault on LGBT Russians and their allies. Last month[4], Ruse penned a Daily Caller column titled "Putin is not the gay bogeyman,"[5] in which he unfavorably compared the U.S.'s tolerance for the "immorality" of LGBT rights to Russia's new laws. (Ruse's support for international anti-gay crackdowns isn't confined to Russia. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented[6], Ruse and his organization have worked in Belize to keep gay sex punishable by 10 years in prison.)

You won't just find defenses of Russia's anti-gay laws limited to The Daily Caller's opinion section. After President Barack Obama condemned the Russian crackdown earlier this month, Daily Caller White House correspondent Neil Munro questioned[7] why Obama would weigh in on "a domestic matter only affecting the citizens of Russia." Munro further stated that Russia's demographic challenges, including a declining birth rate, made the country's anti-gay policies understandable.

Harrowing reports[8] show how horrific life has become for Russia's LGBT citizens over the past several months, and the Kremlin's crackdown is certain to stoke further violence[9] against LGBT people. The Daily Caller has made clear that its sympathies lie elsewhere.